New Tim Winton book The Shepherd's Hut acquired by Picador

08 September 2017

Sophie Jonathan, Senior Editor at Picador, has acquired UK & Commonwealth including Canadian Rights for acclaimed Australian writer Tim Winton’s new novel The Shepherd’s Hut from Jenny Darling & Associates. Rights have also been acquired by FSG (US), Penguin Random House Australia (ANZ) and Luchterhand (Germany).

Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he doesn’t know how much more he can take. Then, in one terrible moment of violence, the life he’s known ends. And Jaxie flees his sleepy hometown. He’s not just running from the cops; he’s headed north for the only person in the world who understands him, carrying nothing except what he will keep him alive.

He traverses the vast, bare West Australian wheatbelt, heading towards the abandoned goldfields, staying out of sight long enough to reach the refuge of the salt country at the edge of the desert. But what he finds out there will challenge everything he’s ever thought about himself, about what’s right and wrong, about love and death and survival. And it will haunt him forever.

Tender and savage, The Shepherd’s Hut is a stunning meditation on masculinity and power, violence and self-restraint, and on forgiveness and kindness as the ultimate acts of love. The action turns on a knife edge of narrative tension as Tim Winton masterfully delivers a novel raw with emotion and an anti-hero who will break your heart.

Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) describes The Shepherd's Hut as ‘a modern parable of youth being tested by the alluring, corrupted world. It's haunting, poetic and deeply moving – like all Tim Winton's work.’

Ben Ball, Publishing Director of Penguin Random House Australia says: ‘Many people think of Tim Winton as a writer about coastal life, the surf and the water, and yet he writes just as much and as provocatively about the internal landscape of our country as he does about that outer edge. In The Shepherd’s Hut, he takes us into an unforgiving heartland – both geographically and spiritually – and forces us to examine what lies buried there. Both timeless and an acute reflection of our times, it’s a rifle-shot of a novel – crisp, fast, shocking – an urgent masterpiece.’

The Shepherd’s Hut will be published in 2018; 28 June in the UK; 12th March in Australia and New Zealand with the US and Germany to follow.

For further information please contact Kate Green in the Picador Press Office on 020 7014 6369 or via email:[email protected].